Call it a quagmire, if you must, but our recent economic malaise and the fast pace of technological development has left all interested parties -- agencies, CMOs, publishers, regulators, consumers and investors alike - searching for true north.

Advertisers love search stats, but maybe there's a better way to get ahead of the curve on consumers' actions. BlueKai thinks they have it nailed. The company is now issuing a quarterly index of consumer intent action across the Web. Dubbed BlueKai Pulse, the free report reflects data trends and insights from the BlueKai Data Exchange, which aggregates the anonymous intent data of over 145 million unique users on top-tier U.S. e-commerce, online travel agency and auto comparison sites.

It's likely you never heard about Intel's 90-day trial for Alzheimer's patients and their caregivers. That's because the wireless network is built into patients homes. Using numerous types of motion and weight sensors and radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, patients' daily activities are monitored and recorded.

In 2000, we were all rushing to proclaim the arrival of the efficient marketplace. Analysts lined up to write paeans to the logical beauty of e-procurement. Billions and trillions of dollars would grease the wheels of ecommerce, flowing from business to business in clean, straight and rational lines. It all made so much sense: the stripping away of all the messy decision making, ruthlessly commoditizing the Business-to-Business (B2B) market, driving buying through simple value equations.

UPS' cardboard world wows visually, but is it the right package? You are always urged to think outside the box in business. But Doner was thinking inside the box -- more specifically, inside the cardboard box -- when the agency launched a microsite nestled within a cardboard box as part of The UPS Store's integrated Cardboard World campaign. "Our challenge in the brief was to bring Cardboard World to life online in an interactive way and tell the story of how TheUPS Store is more than just shipping," explains Justin Smith, Doner executive vice president/executive creative director for interactive.

Most of us can remember when as children we would ask our parents' permission to do something. And most of us - at least once or twice - probably threw in the old argument, "Well, my friend's mom is letting him do it." Today's social media marketing efforts may sound very familiar.

In a tight market, sem pros need more of an edge than ever to differentiate their brands and deliver results. Therefore, they bid high on keywords to grab as much demand as possible. But assuming this generates traffic, will visitors find cookie-cutter pages, a hit-and-miss scenario in terms of relevance? Or will they find personalized pages, providing measurable conversion lift?

When The Passion of the Christ was first pitched, many Hollywood executives thought it was crazy. So crazy in fact that big budget studios, in the end, didn't foot the entire bill. And how it cost them. When the final tally was told, the box office receipts cleared $600 million, making independent investors extremely wealthy.

I'll be up front: I'm not here to make a case for search expansion into new markets. I'm going to assume that your company, or your brand, has a grasp on that already. However, what I am going to do is highlight certain aspects that I've learned from managing campaigns in multiple countries.

Coming out of anthropology, I have always been interested in social and cultural interaction, identity and how we display ourselves in a public venue. Because brands are focusing more and more on social media as a significant point of marketing, it becomes increasingly important to understand the nuances of who is actually speaking and being spoken to in a virtual environment. How do self-presentation strategies impact who we choose to be in a social media space?